"It's all the world to a fellow like me to have such a scholar as you are, Barbara." The words were mild enough; but his eager manner and his air of confidence, as he stood in front of her sun-bonnet and spoke, with his face flushed, and in a low and unsteady voice, made his speech a half confession. Startled at this sudden downfall of his resolution, he got back over the fence and went straight away, without giving her a chance to say anything; without so much as uttering a civil good-bye. The precipitation of his retreat only served to lend the greater significance to his unpremeditated speech. Mrs. Grayson complained that there was "no sense in a girl's studyin' algebra, an' tryin' to know more 'n many a good schoolmaster ever knowed when I was a girl. Ever since Barbary's been at that new-fangled study, it's seemed like as if she'd somehow'r nuther gone deranged. She'll say supper's ready when they ain't knife nur fork on the table; an' she's everlastin'ly losin' her knittin'-needles an' puttin' her thimble where she can't find it, or mislayin' her sun-bonnet. Ef her head was loose, she'd be shore to leave that around somewheres, liker'n not." If Hiram Mason's half-involuntary love-making had not brought Barbara unmeasured pleasure she would not have been the normal young woman that she was. He filled all her ideals, and went beyond the highest standard she had set up before she knew him. She was not the kind of a girl that one meets nowadays; at least, that one meets nowadays in novels. She did not have a lot of perfectly needless and inconceivably fine-spun conscientious scruples to prevent the course of her fortune from running smoothly. She did find in herself a drawing back from the future which Mason's partiality had brought within the range of her vision. But her scruple was only one of pride; she exaggerated the superiority of an educated family, such as she conceived his to be, and she reflected that the Graysons were simple country people. She felt in herself that she could never endure the mortification she would feel, as Hiram's wife, if the Masons should look down on her good but unlettered mother, and say or feel that Hiram had "married below him." If, now, Tom should come to something, the equation would be made good.